With the emergence of information age, popularization of Personal Computers (PC) and wide application of the Internet, computer information technologies have been effectively combined with various walks of life, various emerging technologies and emerging services continuously appear, and requirements of users on data bandwidths increase at the same time. In order to meet a high-bandwidth requirement of an individual user, an operating company requires network equipment to have high capacity and high access and processing performance. In order to meet requirements on high capacity and high access and processing performance, most of network equipment in the related art adopts a distributed system deployed with a large number of Central Processing units (CPU).
Firmware is software embedded into a hardware device, and may be updated by a user. Firmware upgrading refers to improving a working program or source code in hardware by virtue of a special upgrading program to achieve an improvement in compatibility, performance or functions. A difference between firmware upgrading and driver updating is that the firmware upgrading is the updating from a bottom layer of a machine, which is more direct and effective, and is more obvious in performance improvement. Along with gradual popularization and large-scale use of a multi-processor distributed system to the telecommunication industry and increase of a requirement of a user on performance of network equipment, the firmware upgrading of a single board must be more frequent.
Joint Test Action Group (JTAG) is an international standard test protocol (IEEE 1149.1) which has been widely adopted by electronic enterprises throughout the world. Up to now, almost all large-scale and complicated digital circuits are compatible with IEEE 1149.1. Firmware upgrading by virtue of a JTAG interface also becomes a mainstream gradually.
One of the methods for upgrading firmware in a related art is to connect JTAG devices of the entire single board into a daisy chain form in series, set one or more JTAG interfaces according to a practical condition and perform scanning and firmware data loading on all the JTAG devices of the single board through a JTAG socket. However, the method has defects as follows:
(1) firmware upgrading data may be loaded only through the JTAG socket, which causes inconvenience in field maintenance; and
(2) firmware data cannot be remotely upgraded.
According to another method for upgrading firmware in the related art, information interaction is performed between a subrack management board and a single board to be upgraded, a target file stored by the subrack management board is loaded into a storage component of the single board to be upgraded, and a controller (for example: a single-chip microcomputer) of the single board to be upgraded controls to write the target file into a JTAG device or a JTAG chain to complete scanning and loading of the JTAG device or the JTAG chain. Although remote upgrading is implemented, such a solution still has shortcomings as follows:
(1) firmware upgrading of the subrack management board and the controller of the single board to be upgraded cannot be implemented, and part of the system still cannot be upgraded; and
(2) the controller of the single board to be upgraded is required to be in a working state, and if the controller is in a failure state for a certain reason, firmware upgrading cannot be performed.